Are music lessons the way to get smarter? That's what a lot of parents and experts believe: studying an instrument gives children an advantage in the development of their intellectual, perceptual, and cognitive skills. This may, however, turn out to be wishful thinking. Two highly convincing trials carried out recently have found no evidence to support this idea; the IQs of pre-school children who attended several weeks of music classes as part of these studies did not differ significantly from the IQs of those who had not.
But that does not mean that the advantages of learning to play music are limited to expressing yourself, impressing friends, or just having fun. A growing number of studies show that learning an instrument in childhood can do something perhaps more valuable for the brain: it can provide benefits as we age, in the form of an added defense against memory loss, cognitive decline, and impaired hearing. Not only that, you may well get those benefits even if you haven't picked up your instrument in years, or decide to take up music for the first time in mid-life or beyond. According to neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna-Pladdy of Emory University in Atlanta, the time spent learning and practicing specific types of motor control and coordination each finger on each hand doing something different, and for wind and brass instruments, also using your mouth and breathing-contributes to the brain boost that shows up later in life.
You can even map the impact of musical training on the brain itself. In one study, Harvard neurologist Gottfried Schlaug found that the brains of adult professional musicians had a larger volume of grey matter than the brains of non-musicians had. Schlaug and colleagues also found that after 15 months of musical training in early childhood, structural brain changes associated with motor and auditory Improvements begin to appear. What's unique about playing an instrument is that it requires a wide array of brain regions and cognitive functions to work together simultaneously, in both right and left hemispheres of the brain,' says Alison Balbag of the University of Southern California. Playing music may be an efficient way to stimulate the brain', she says, 'cutting across a broad swath of its regions and cognitive functions and with ripple effects through the decades."
More research is showing this might well be the case. In her first study on the subject, Hanna-Pladdy divided 70 healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 83 into three groups: musicians who had studied an instrument for at least ten years, those who had played between one and nine years, and a control group who had never learned an instrument. The group who had studied for at least ten years scored the highest when tested in such areas as nonverbal and visuo-spatial memory, naming objects, and taking in and adapting new information. Her follow-up study a year later confirmed those findings and further suggested that starting musical training before the age of nine and keeping at it for ten years or more may yield the greatest benefits. Interestingly, it was the group who had the lowest level of general education which showed the greatest gap in scores between those who had studied an instrument in childhood and those who had not. Hanna-Pladdy suspects that musical training could have made up for the lack of cognitive stimulation these people had.
Neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University in Chicago has found still more positive effects of early musical training. She measured the electrical activity in the auditory brainstem of adults, aged 55 to 70, as they responded to the synthesized speech syllable "da." Although none of the subjects had played a musical instrument in 40 years, those who had trained the longest - between four and fourteen years - responded the fastest. "That's significant," says Kraus, "because hearing tends to decline as we age, including the ability to quickly and accurately discern consonants, a skill crucial to understanding and participating in conversation. If your nervous system is not keeping up with the timing necessary for encoding consonants, you will lose out on the flow and meaning of the conversation, and that can potentially create a downward spiral leading to a sense of social isolation," says Kraus. In addition, the fact that musical training appears to enhance auditory working memory might help reinforce in later life the memory capacity that facilitates verbal interaction."
In another study at the University of South Florida, assistant professor of music education Jennifer Bugos studied the impact of elementary piano instruction on adults between the ages of 60 and 85. After six months, those who had received piano lessons showed more robust gains in memory, verbal fluency, the speed at which they processed information, planning ability, and other cognitive functions compared with those who had not received the lessons. Bugos believes that playing an instrument has beneficial effects, regardless of how old the person is when he or she begins. "Musical training contains all the components of a cognitive training program that sometimes are overlooked," she says. "And just as we work out our bodies, we should work out our minds."
